George Reisman's blog

This essay, “Capitalist Planning and Socialist Chaos,” shows that capitalism has all-pervasive but unrecognized economic planning. The separate, individual plans of all of its hundreds of millions, indeed, billions of individual participants, are harmonized, coordinated, and integrated by the price system and profit motive. Socialism, in contrast, is a chaotic “anarchy of production,” made that way by the stupendously ignorant and arrogant attempt to monopolize economic planning by a handful of government officials who prohibit economic planning by everyone else.

“The Toxicity of Environmentalism” is a major critique of environmentalism that was featured as the concluding, summary essay in Jay Lehr, ed., Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns. It is now available to the general public for 99¢ as a Kindle Book on Amazon.com.

This essay shows that the goal of equality of opportunity is both absurd and vicious. Achieving it would require that children all be raised in the same environment and have the same genetic inheritance. In contrast, the essay shows that what we should actually strive for is the freedom of opportunity.

The first part of this very short book is a critique of the views expressed by the multi-billionaire Warren Buffett on the subjects of class warfare, taxation, and “The Giving Pledge.” The second part, which is a section of my book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, goes deeper and seeks to overturn the foundations of Buffett’s and most other people’s ideas concerning the relationship between profits and wages.

“Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism,” which is now available for 99¢ as a Kindle Book on Amazon.com, is a demonstration of the objective superiority of Western Civilization and slap in the face of cultural relativism and political correctness.

The recent mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado and then in Oak Creek Wisconsin have led to renewed demands for “gun control” aimed ultimately at depriving the individual citizen of his Constitutional right to keep and bear arms. It is believed that if the individual were deprived of this right, such shootings would not take place, because of the sheer lack of available weaponry.

I've just published a new book. It's as short as Capitalism is long, i.e., 59 pages. Its title is Warren Buffett, Class Warfare, and the Exploitation Theory. It appears in Kindle format on Amazon.com and sells for 99¢.

You have been quoted time and again, without any denial on your part that I am aware of, as having said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were allowed to remain in New York’s Zucotti Park for two months, against the will of its private owners. They were clearly trespassers, indeed, much worse than garden variety trespassers, who almost always quickly leave. They were there prepared to stay indefinitely. In effect, they were literally attempting to steal the park from its lawful owners.

How a Highly Productive and Provident One Percent Provides the Standard of Living of a Largely Ignorant and Ungrateful Ninety-Nine Percent

The protesters in the Occupy Wall Street Movement and its numerous clones elsewhere in the country and around the world chant that one percent of the population owns all the wealth and lives at the expense of the remaining ninety-nine percent.

Labor unions like to argue that the payment of higher wages is to the self-interest of employers because the wage earners will use their higher wages to make additional purchases from business firms, thereby increasing the sales revenues and profits of business firms. However, wrong and foolish it may be, this is an argument worth analyzing in some detail, because it can provide a gateway to a discussion of the actual sources of profit in the economic system.

There is a fundamental fact about the world that has profound implications for the supply of natural resources and for the relationship between production and economic activity on the one side and man’s environment on the other.

Anita Dunn, is described by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as “one of the major decision makers of the Obama campaign” and as one of Obama’s “four top advisers (along with David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs).”

The real estate bubble, like the stock market bubble before it, was caused by credit expansion. The credit expansion was instigated and sustained by the Federal Reserve System, which could have aborted it at any time but chose not to. As a result, the Federal Reserve System and those in charge of it at during the real estate bubble bear responsibility for major harm to tens of millions of Americans.

General Motors was once not only the world’s greatest and most prosperous automobile company but the world’s greatest and most prosperous manufacturing company, indeed, the world’s greatest and most prosperous company of any kind.

In your NY Times column of today you write, “But if everyone takes a pay cut, nobody gains a competitive advantage. So there’s no benefit to the economy from lower wages. Meanwhile, the fall in wages can worsen the economy’s problems on other fronts.”

Standing Keynesianism on Its Head: as Employment Increases in Response to a Fall in Wage Rates, the Rate of Profit Rises, Not Falls

This is the third in a series of articles that seeks to provide the intelligent layman with sufficient knowledge of sound economic theory to enable him to understand what must be done to overcome the present financial crisis and return to the path of economic progress and prosperity.

In a previous article, I explained how falling prices, far from being deflation, are actually the antidote to deflation. They are the antidote, I explained, because they enable the reduced amount of spending that deflation entails to buy as much as did the previously larger amount of spending that took place in the economic system prior to the deflation.

A recent article in The New York Times quotes President Obama as saying, “I don’t buy the argument that providing workers with collective-bargaining rights somehow weakens the economy or worsens the business environment. If you’ve got workers who have decent pay and benefits, they’re also customers for business.” (March 2, 2009, p. B3.)

This two-part article is the second in a series of articles that seeks to provide the intelligent layman with sufficient knowledge of sound economic theory to enable him to understand what must be done to overcome the present financial crisis and return to the path of economic progress and prosperity.

New York Times Columnist Maureen Dowd Wants Soviet-Style Show Trials with Capitalist Defendants in Shackles
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written a column (January 28, 2009) full of withering hatred and contempt for many of today’s most prominent businessmen, first and foremost the heads of the Wall Street Banks.

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The opinions expressed here are the unmoderated views of the contributors who express them.They do not necessarily reflect the views of other contributors, or of SOLO, and do not necessarily align with Objectivism.